Goat Simulator 2014 GDC preview promises glitchy caprine capers

In the final hours of the 2014 Game Developers Conference, we at Ars began scouring its show floor for last-minute gems. Between indie-gaming pavilions, hardware announcements, and fascinating panels, great gaming stories can still fall through the cracks.

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So, we took a final-hour opportunity to walk through the show floor's nether regions, and tucked between the Scandinavian student outreach booth and the men's room, we found a criminally hidden piece of software that may forever change the farm animal gaming genre: Goat Simulator. (No relation to the recently announced Bear Simulator, which may forever change the wild animal gaming genre.)

That's an intentional oversell, but for a game called Goat Simulator, hyperbole is much of the point. The game began as a tech-demo lark to poke fun at the rising trend of weirdly serious "Simulator" games, including Euro Truck Simulator and Agricultural Simulator. Its co-creator, Armin Ibrisagic, posted a phony "alpha footage" video last month, which didn't involve calmly walking a goat around a farm. Instead, it threw a glitchy goat in a 3D world, headbutting buckets and unrealistically flying in the air after being hit by a car.

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Goat Simulator was supposed to end there, but millions of views and dozens of viral stories later, Coffee Stain Studios figured, what the heck, let's simulate some goats. "The funniest was when a magazine called Modern Farmer wrote about it," Ibrisagic said on the GDC show floor. Indeed, mainstream reactions to the game have been about its humour, but unlike other similar, oddball games, Ibrisagic appears poised to make this glitchy, patently stupid game as playable -- and fun -- as possible.

The gameplay hook is shamelessly pilfered from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater; as Ibrisagic put it, "instead of doing [skateboard] tricks, you get points for doing stupid stuff." Surprisingly, the game has been crafted to put a lot of amusingly dumb manoeuvres within easy, chainable reach, like headbutting an outdoor yoga class, or using your tongue to get stuck to a car ripping donuts in a hayfield. The entire game map is peppered with this sort of goat-approved nonsense, if you're wondering.

The more mayhem your goat achieves, the more points you get, and a list of objectives keeps players looking for alternate means of mayhem to keep that score ticking higher and higher. The game is no world-changer by a longshot, but its arcade-style mechanics will prove a pleasant surprise to anybody who buys this game merely for the laughs.

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Goat Simulator is currently ripe with glitches, particularly with the titular character's bendy neck getting stuck in objects, but Ibrisagic pledged not to fix most of the problems in time for the game's purported launch of April 1st (a date he insisted was no prank). "I'm only fixing crashes," he said. "Everything else is totally hilarious, so we're keeping it."